Scenario

A log file contains various text entries with email addresses scattered throughout. You need to extract all unique email addresses for further processing.

Task

Write a Python script at /home/interview/extract_emails.py that reads /home/interview/logs.txt, uses regular expressions to extract all email addresses, removes duplicates, and saves the unique emails to /home/interview/emails.txt (one email per line).

Example

Expected output format in /home/interview/emails.txt:

[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
...

Step 1: Examine the log file

head -20 /home/interview/logs.txt

Review the file structure to see how emails are scattered throughout the text.

Step 2: Create the Python script

nano /home/interview/extract_emails.py

Write a script that uses regex to find all emails and removes duplicates:

import re

# Read the log file
with open('/home/interview/logs.txt', 'r') as f:
    content = f.read()

# Extract all email addresses using regex
email_pattern = r'\b[A-Za-z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Za-z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z|a-z]{2,}\b'
emails = re.findall(email_pattern, content)

# Remove duplicates by converting to set, then back to sorted list
unique_emails = sorted(set(emails))

# Save to output file
with open('/home/interview/emails.txt', 'w') as f:
    f.write('\n'.join(unique_emails))

print(f"Extracted {len(unique_emails)} unique emails from {len(emails)} total")

Step 3: Run the script

python3 /home/interview/extract_emails.py

Step 4: Verify the output

head /home/interview/emails.txt

Should show unique email addresses, one per line, sorted alphabetically.